#patrickstormborn

I WAS LITERALLY JUST THINKING THIS

This is sweet!

traveling

food

the ocean

animals

I definitely think this precedes the epilogue at least (which fits with it being pushed from adwd) - but it’s hard to tell with no mention of King’s Landing. I guess the timeline will keep blurring now GRRM’s caught up with the 5 year gap.

Yeah, it’s confusing. Hopefully future Sansa chapters will help give some context re the timeline.

poorquentyn reblogged your post patrickstormborn replied to your post ... and added:

It also might have something to do with Aegon’s landing and/or the fall of Storm’s End. I’ve long wondered how LF will react to this news…

How LF (and Sansa as the POV and person who might be most affected) will deal with Aegon is something I’ve wondered about for some time now also. At the moment the distance may make any meeting unlikely -- as it’s probable that after capturing the Stormlands Aegon and the GC will go for the Crownlands and KL, and the Vale will continue to be uninvolved -- but you never know what kind of twist GRRM might pull here. Something I don’t think anything but TWOW will tell us, I’m afraid.

swiftsnowmane replied to your post: patrickstormborn replied to your post ...

LOL @ your Kettleblack bros. tag

it looks like this chapter takes place before the adwd epilogue so i tend to think oswell's urgent news must be cersei's arrest. presumably he knows about his son's arrest too (or sons' arrests? i still lose track of the kettleblacks)

Per the fanmade timeline, Sansa’s last AFFC chapter was right before Cersei’s arrest (and LF speaks about Cersei “destroy[ing] herself”), and this is at least a week or more since then (I’d think several weeks considering the preparations for the tourney), so I shouldn’t think that wouldn’t be the urgent news, that LF already would have known? Although it might be, depends on how fast news travels I suppose.

I find the Kettleblacks to be fairly interchangeable too, tbh, but all three brothers were arrested. Osney was arrested by the Faith after he told them he slept with Margaery, and then confessed under torture to sleeping with Cersei and killing the previous High Septon -- he’s set to be executed for that. Osmund (of the Kingsguard) and Osfryd (of the Gold Cloaks) were arrested by Kevan Lannister after Cersei confessed to sleeping with them, and their choices are the Wall or facing Cersei’s champion. (I’m gonna bet they’ll go with the Wall, especially if they get to make this choice after Cersei’s champion utterly destroys faces the Faith’s champion.)

Maybe Oswell’s news is related to the result of Cersei’s trial? Although either the arrests or the trial results make me wonder why LF was so concerned about embargoing food all of a sudden... Oh! Wait, I know. Oswell could’ve brought word of the arrests and/or the trial... but he also for sure brought word of the snow in the Riverlands and maybe also the blizzard in King’s Landing. News about the weather in those areas is a big reason the Gulltown merchants would be so eager to buy/sell food.

xoxoxx

hmmm how about

nigheandonns - One of my absolute favourite people ever- your determination and endurance definitely inspire me! When I watch you get through shit it really does make me want to keep at it. You are so cool and intelligent and talented I have always looked up to you. You were actually one of the reasons I joined tumblr tbh. I remember stalking your blog years ago- I think I'd found it somehow, found your asoiaf posts, and it made me want to become a part of this site. Xoxox.

ramsaysnow - My absolutely life line tbh. I don't know how I would have gotten through the past few years without being able to think "you know what? she'd get this, I'll message her". And you always do, it's so amazing/strange/bizarre how you are essentially me. What else to say? I adore you and am grateful for your presence, more so than any other person! Is it narcissism that makes me say this? Maybe. Will we ever know for sure? Probably not. 

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Patrickstormborn said:

I don’t think Diane and Cary’s reactions to Alicia’s campaign have been handled particularly well/coherently… but I definitely think their behaviour at the end of the episode makes sense.

We’ve seen hints of Diane’s uneasiness with Alicia’s campaign, but generally they’ve been overshadowed both narratively and in-world by Cary’s arrest. Obviously there’s no point Diane criticising/expressing her displeasure with Alicia running when Cary is facing a prison charge. But once Cary is freed, that’s gone.

And then at the beginning of this episode we see the opposite of the spectrum: Diane’s complete support for Alicia. She tells Alicia to “kick ass”, and generally there doesn’t seem to be any problem about Alicia running. I think you pointed this out as a contradiction for Diane’s later behaviour, but I actually think it’s important that Diane is supporting Alicia at first. Because I don’t think Diane’s later reaction is supposed to represent her negative feelings bubbling to the surface or anything like that. I think Diane is genuinely supporting Alicia’s campaign. But it irritates - no, angers - her that Alicia could sideline her own firm (that she started by “stealing clients” from Lockhart/Gardner), and then take the moral highground over David Lee.

And I think that’s why I’m so uncomfortable with Alicia then resorting to gender and sexism - because Diane has only ever supported Alicia’s campaign. But Diane the woman and Diane the partner at a law firm are two different things. She supports Alicia as a woman, a friend and a co-worker, but she is angry that Alicia still believes she has the right to criticise logical business choices even when she’s perfectly content to step away from FAL.

As for David Lee… I think that adds another layer of complexity into this argument. As you noted, Alicia is specifically against David Lee. But I think it’s important that Diane and Cary don’t want him there either, and that would further explain why Diane gets defensive: she doesn’t want to be bringing him back either, but she’s being forced to compromise while Alicia is divorced from the reality of their business.

And that reminds me of a key problem I had with the final scene. We go from an episode about race to another white man being hired, and most weirdly… Alicia sudenly going on a rant about women? Obviously gender has always been at the forefront of The Good Wife and I think they handle it well, but it just felt so unnecessary in an episode that had been devoted to racism and white privilege. It looked like Alicia had listened to the voices of everyone talking about racism… and used it to victimise herself further?

The confusion for me is that I don’t know whether they’re trying to play it as Alicia being right (like they normally do).

I think their behavior at the end of the episode would make sense if the writers had built it up properly. It makes sense that Diane and Cary would react the way they did; it makes no sense that they would react the way they did when they did.

Can I ask what you’re referring to when you say Diane seemed uneasy about Alicia’s campaign? I can only think of one moment—6x03—that qualifies, and one that might count if you really want to stretch it (when Diane takes Alicia the news about Trey Wagner’s death and Alicia thinks she’s talking about a campaign related thing). I don’t understand why it’s so obvious that Diane wouldn’t express her displeasure with Alicia running while Cary’s facing a prison charge. It could very well overshadow things and lead Diane to not want to create any more conflicts, but for us not to see Diane feel any conflicting emotions (even—or especially—ones she doesn’t share with Alicia) about this is unrealistic, bad writing. We barely saw Diane for a large chunk of season six, and when we saw her, it was in silly subplots (like moving back to the L/G office space) where she acted essentially on her own and tried to mold Alicia and Cary’s firm to her will. (Now, Alicia was probably on board with these moves, as she never fought against them, which is ALSO something I take issue with: Alicia says they don’t need to move offices in 6x05, but she’s totally on board in 6x06, and we never see the vote, for example.) I agree that Cary’s newfound freedom changes things, but I don’t think it changes things like this.

It’s interesting to me that Diane was so supportive at the beginning of the episode—the Kings must’ve included that for a reason (just as they must’ve included her support of Alicia last week for a reason). I’m just not sure what that reason was. Does Diane see it as a trade-off, like she’ll support Alicia in her run for SA but she won’t support Alicia both as SA and as partner? That could be. But it’s not an idea that the episode spends much time on. If that’s the case, we’re told to fill in the blanks, and quite frankly, I’m sick of filling in the blanks. The writers can’t throw things at the screen and expect me to find the connections: they have to tell their story. If Diane was supposed to be angry that Alicia was being hypocritical, the writers completely failed to explain that in the last scene. If that’s what she’s angry about, the writers should’ve had her discuss that. They shouldn’t have had her act confrontational, look condescendingly at Alicia instead of explaining calmly that they had to move quickly and saying that maybe it's time they talk about Alicia's role in the firm as she's running for office, and completely out of the blue decide that Alicia no longer had a voice in the firm. Diane goes right for the attack, even though Alicia is visibly trying to keep her cool and understand where Diane is coming from (note all of her pauses). What would explain this scene to me is if there were a deleted scene of Diane and Cary talking about Alicia where they express concern about the future of their firm and realize that they feel Alicia’s been putting her interests above the firm’s, so they’re already agitated when Alicia walks in, and we know it. (I think the ChumHum plot should’ve been scrapped in favor of a few scenes of Diane and Cary watching Alicia on TV and reacting to her arguments.)  It could be that Diane’s angered, as you said, that Alicia’s trying to take the moral highground here. But that’s not something the scene conveys to me in any way. And even if it were, it’s still something that I feel needs a lot more context and an example of behavior that absolutely would have come up earlier in the season.  

I do agree that Diane supports Alicia and that it’s completely unfair for Alicia to accuse Diane of sexism. I also completely agree that it makes a lot of sense for Diane to be angered about Alicia feeling entitled to a vote at the firm she’s hoping to leave. But neither of those things help me to understand Diane in this scene. There is still no context. Diane’s anger makes sense; Diane’s anger here, no matter how much I try to see it as logical, feels sudden and poorly built up. I would LOVE this scene—LOVE it—if the writers had been building to it. This is the kind of thread they could easily have been developing all season, culminating in this Diane/Cary alliance the second that Alicia’s campaign becomes the most pressing problem the firm is facing.

You make an excellent point about Diane not being thrilled about bringing David Lee back, either. I can see her being agitated about that—but I also think the episode needed to show THAT a little more, too! Diane and Cary just sort of nodded in agreement like, “sigh, we need to do this, ugh,” and then hired him back. But the show couldn’t have given us a line or two about how David Lee pushed Diane out of her own firm less than a year ago? I’m just going to keep coming back to this point: for this scene to work for me, I NEEDED more development of Diane; to see her reacting to things consistently over the course of the season; to see what FAL looked like day to day so I had context.